SHUANG LI

This newly commissioned video installation explores storm chasing, a phenomenon rooted in the American landscape yet increasingly witnessed globally through livestreaming and new media platforms. An exploration of Li’s encounter with accelerated digital flows, extreme weather systems, and the erosion of boundaries between physical and virtual life, the work repositions storm chasing from its North American origins as a universal metaphor for navigating the spiralling forces, namely algorithmic media and the commodification of lived experience, that shape contemporary life across borders.

Pirated media shaped the artist’s early worldview—knockoff Nintendo, bootleg CDs, and the Myspace and YouTube culture of the pre-Great Firewall Chinese internet in the early 2000s, through which she absorbed geography, popular culture, and English (most notably from My Chemical Romance). These channels became her primary lens onto the world from her teenage home in the Wuyi Mountains, forging a personal perspective rooted in navigating fluid borders.

The exhibition and video installation share the title Alliance, after the Nebraska town Li passed through during her storm-chasing journey, where the entire town is essentially a train yard. Drawing from her ongoing fascination with non-spaces as existential conditions rather than physical locales, the installation—developed with architect Luis Ortega Govela of Office LOG—evokes the experience of being aboard a high-speed train in China, where one feels the tension and sensation of being perfectly still while hurtling forward, mirroring our highly mediated reality where one can anonymously witness distant disasters in real time from home.

In Singapore, a city known for its highly optimized infrastructure, climate mitigation, and seamless financial systems, these themes take on particular resonance. Beneath the efficiency of these circulatory flows lie the same tensions, the commission addresses environmental precarity and the constant velocity of digital life. Embodying a transnational perspective shaped by her own trajectory between Asia and Europe, Li invites audiences to recognize that feeling of being in-between, inhabiting non-spaces that are at once familiar and anonymous. In seeking ruptures within borderless systems of control, Alliance probes what forms of presence remain possible within increasingly mediated realities.

Alliance (2026) is commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with Yenn and Alan Lo Foundation, on the occasion of Shuang Li’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel this June.